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Preface

Researching the Life of Josie Mpama/Palmer

Piecing together the life of Josie Mpama/Palmer was challenging and required me to draw on a range of oral and written sources. My initial interest in her emanated from my research on Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, her common-law husband from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. I interviewed him at length in Lesotho (where he lived in exile) in the 1980s. After the dramatic change in South Africa’s political environment in 1990, I started collecting information on Josie. A starting point was an interview that Julia Wells conducted with her in 1977 that focused on her activism in the South African city of Potchefstroom. I interviewed two of her daughters, Carol and Hilda, in 1995 as well as close friends who lived in her neighborhood in 1998. Later I interviewed four of her grandchildren, Belinda and Virginia Palmer and Lorraine and Bella Johnson, who spent much time in her home in Mzimhlophe when they were growing up and who gave me their generation’s perspective on her.

I also identified a variety of written sources. I combed through Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), left-of-center, and black newspapers published in the 1930s and 1940s. These contained materials on her public activities as well as columns by her on women’s issues.

Government records at the National Archives in Pretoria yielded information on her father, Stephen Mpama: a divorce case, a criminal trial, and the estate record at his death. The archives also contained extensive Potchefstroom municipal records on the protests of the late 1920s in which Josie Mpama participated. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Justice Department issued regular reports on communist activities in the Union of South Africa that occasionally mentioned her activities. I also consulted the Justice Department’s banning file on Josie Mpama from the 1940s and 1950s.

Critical records came from the papers of two important figures in the CPSA, Jack and Ray Simons, held at the University of Cape Town. Their papers include minutes of a critical CPSA central committee meeting at the end of 1938.

A crucial breakthrough came in 1998 when I examined the extensive Communist International (Comintern) and CPSA records at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow. The CPSA may have been careful about defining its image to outsiders, but its records are remarkably revealing and do not shy away from revealing internal splits, personal disputes, and ideological controversies. When Josie was in Moscow for party training in 1935, she left writings, including an autobiography about her youth and candid essays detailing her views on CPSA matters. While there, she testified at an important Comintern hearing on ideological disputes within the CPSA that featured Moses Kotane and Lazar Bach.

Despite consulting this range of sources, I still found significant gaps in reconstructing phases of Josie’s life. I hope that other historians will unearth more material.

A Note on the Names Mpama and Palmer

Josie used two surnames, Mpama and Palmer. Mpama (sometimes spelled “M’Pama”) came from her father, Stephen Mpama. The change to Palmer, an anglicization of Mpama, came in the mid-1930s when she and her family were living in Sophiatown. The advantage of taking the name Palmer is that her children could, with a European name, qualify for better schools. Because she shifted back and forth between the names throughout her life, I have avoided confusion by often referring to her simply as Josie in my narrative.